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Biotech The Almighty Buck Science Technology

Editing DNA For Fame and Fortune 62

Posted by Soulskill from the careful-what-you-optimize-for dept.
An anonymous reader writes: The world of genome editing is booming, with several startups racing to develop new tools and therapies out of the DNA-hacking insights of several hotshot scientists. Venture capitalists are pouring big money into this so-called 'CRISPR craze,' which has attracted over $600 million in funding since the beginning of 2013. But major questions loom over who is the rightful owner of this technology, and the leading parties are battling for control of the key patents. Will this new crop of genome-editing companies survive long enough to fulfill their promise of treating genetic disorders? As the patent feud wages on, lives and fortunes hang in the balance.
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Editing DNA For Fame and Fortune More

Editing DNA For Fame and Fortune

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  • Today it'll fix genetic disorders. Tomorrow it'll allow us to change our attributes.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Like cup size. Invest in bra manufacturers!

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Adriax ( 746043 )

        Charisma is just one SPECIAL you can raise with this. I'd personally be more interested in Luck.

        I wonder how many caps it'll cost per treatment?

  • For instance, here's the 4 assed monkey.

  • It is time to recompile humanity. Too many bugs in the old stable release. First we can patch out bugs, but we will also be able to optimize performance and add new features. This way we won't have to be scared of AI out of fear that it could rewrite itself. We would be able to do that as well.

    • Re:Time to recompile humanity (Score:5, Insightful)

      by sinij ( 911942 ) on Friday June 19, 2015 @09:48AM (#49945249)
      Feature requests:

      1. Perfect recall

      2. Integrated ALU capable of complex math

      3. Direct userland control over driver behavior (e.g. uninstall gluttony)

      4. More wetware redundancies to increase uptime

      5. Run-time patching and garbage collection to reduce the need for nightly downtime
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • You realize those bugs are mutations that allowed "us" to happen. Without them organisms would not have evolved beyond single celled organisms.
      • Yeah, but we can do better than random modifications if we have a solid understanding of ourselves. Huge challenge though, as our biology is a huge example of spaghetti code. Right now, changing one gene can have a complex cascade of unintended consequences. Some level of interdependency is probably necessary, but it's likely that a lot of it isn't, it just ended up that way randomly. It will really be the golden age of DNA modification if we figure out enough that we can start unraveling those interdep

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by pesho ( 843750 )

          Yeah, but we can do better than random modifications if we have a solid understanding of ourselves.

          Can you do better? May be you could in the simplest of cases, where we know that the gene variant in another organism works better than the variant we have. Even in such cases you will need to brace yourself for the unexpected consequences. The number of nonlinear interactions between different genes, and between genes and the environment makes it very hard to predict outcomes. There is a virtue in having a population with buggy, unstable and diverse genomes. If the environment changes, and it alwys does, t

          • Me? Absolutely not. I'm a software engineer, not a biochemist. That doesn't mean that nobody can. We've mapped the genome, now the job is figuring out what everything does, including all of the interactions. Once we know that (which is a truly massive task that has only just begun), we can start looking at what we can change to make things work better. It might require changing many things at once in order to separate, for example, two biological pathways that are currently connected, where correcting
        • There are 2 ways to handle this: 1-map out everything and figure out what/how everything works, so there are no unexpected results. 2-try stuff out and see what happens. Obviously plan 2 requires a corporation and a 3rd world military dictatorship, as they don't have moral values and human rights laws to block this.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by pesho ( 843750 )
            How exactly is "1-map out everything and figure out what/how everything works, so there are no unexpected results." different from "2-try stuff out and see what happens."? Is far as I know the way we "figure how something works" is to "try stuff out and see what happens". We do this with lab animals and then try as best as we can to show that the animal model is a good approximation to the human. If this is the case we can assume that we whatever "stuff" we tried on the animal will work the same way in huma

    • Where are my mod points? And why isn't there an option for "-5 Stupidly Naive and Autistic"?

      Look at the problems space programs have had world over. Mission scrubbing bugs revolving around things as trivial as converting between metric and imperial. Mistakes made by teams comprised of literally some of the smartest people on the entire planet.

      And you're naive enough to think we'd be able to do better than millions of years of trial and error evolution?

      No thank you.

  • If it ever takes off, no stopping it (Score:4, Interesting)

    by sideslash ( 1865434 ) on Friday June 19, 2015 @09:45AM (#49945217)
    If genetic modifications ever emerge as the medical miracle they're supposed to, there will be no stopping the use of the technology. All you need is for a country to refuse to enforce or recognize the patents, and presto -- the world's foremost medical tourism destination. I sort of despise the idea of patenting features of nature, so perhaps a bit of schadenfreude there.

    I have no doubt the information will be spread, too. If Snowden can be widely hailed as a hero for leaking the NSA's rampant cybercrime, just imagine the pats on the back for the guy who leaks the key to cancer. (Yeah, yeah, along with threats of jail time, so he'll have to light out for Cambodia or whatever.)

    • All you need is for a country to refuse to enforce or recognize the patents

      I certainly wish for a few of those, but they WILL be invaded, even nuked, if that's what it takes. The mafia state will not be denied.

    • It will likely be China. You won't get a molecule or drug out of these kinds of 'treatments' - you'll get a protocol that involves specialized handling and specific, tailor made molecules. So you likely won't see patent busting big chemical factories like you now see in India, you need a back room (or more likely an entire building) of highly developed infrastructure, trained people and some significant time to get these techniques to work. It won't be quite as easy as TFA seems to think it is*.

      China fit

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by plover ( 150551 )

      I still don't understand how they can control it well enough. It seems like 99.9% of the mods they might try to make would result in a cancerous tumor. And if that's the case, a back alley in Chiba City wouldn't seem so attractive after all.

    • On the spread of genetic modification:

      Whether the agent is engineered by Skynet, Osama II, or the NSA, somebody (anybody) could create a virus that sweeps the world like an annoying, seemingly harmless, flu bug. One that makes the children of every couple who were ever infected have blue eyes, or fingernails that glow in the dark after they eat peanuts, or other things....

      • In many parts of the world, a drug or virus you inject to ensure you only have male children would be worth several years salary. Also a virus that causes infertility, but only against a specific racial group, would be a very desirable biological weapon.

        • It doesn't even have to target humans.... how about a mutation that makes Hitchcock's Birds a reality, on demand when they smell a certain chemical that is odorless to humans....

    • I sort of despise the idea of patenting features of nature

      I'm not sure I would call the therapeutic applications of Crispr/Cas a "feature of nature". Any actual therapy is going to consist of, at a minimum, a combination of synthetic RNA and orthologously expressed Cas9 (probably heavily engineered). This isn't something that exists naturally in humans. I'm generally pretty conservative about what I would consider patentable (software, or "all drugs targeting this protein", are not included), and, frankl

  • Patent What? (Score:3)

    by g0bshiTe ( 596213 ) on Friday June 19, 2015 @10:54AM (#49945919)
    What's to patent? DNA is clearly prior art and in public domain.

  • PUT THE OLD COMMENT LINKS BACK (Score:3)

    by sootman ( 158191 ) on Friday June 19, 2015 @11:14AM (#49946101) Homepage Journal

    That is all.

  • why bother inventing something if you can look forward to a life-long court battle?

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